Is there any way to make Windows 8 blue screen intentionally?

Question

There used to be a debug option involving a registry hack on older versions of Windows that let me blue screen a system on purpose. I'd like to see if my usual blue screen diagnosis tools work on Windows 8, so would there be a way to convince windows to BSOD on purpose in a controllable way?

Answer 1

The Easy way to do this on older versions is set out here.

Basically,

For PS/2 Keyboards:

• Open Regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
• Add a new DWORD (32-bit) Registry value here with name = CrashOnCtrlScroll and value = 1
• Now you close regedit and restart PC
• Finally hold down Right Ctrl and press Scroll Lock twice to trigger the BSOD.

For USB Keyboards:

• Open Regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters
• Add a new DWORD (32-bit) Registry value here with name = CrashOnCtrlScroll and value = 1
• Now you close regedit and restart PC
• Finally hold down Right Ctrl and press Scroll Lock twice to trigger the BSOD.

Answer 2

Copied (in part) from That Brazilian Guy's answer here, with permission

The command line interface for the DiskCryptor Open source partition encryption software includes a -bsod parameter, the wiki says it will

Erase all keys in memory and generate BSOD

Answer 3

An alternative method that works on Windows Vista and might work on 8 (not verified on 7 or 8):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ACPI]
"Start"=dword:00000004

Save it as a .reg file and run it. Your computer will blue screen on reboot. Return to last good configuration or change the value back to 0 to fix it.

Source

Installing incompatible drivers can work as well. Try to install out-dated video-drivers.